Just back from a short holiday, I have just learned
that Yale University Press has
cancelled
the scheduled publication in an academic work of 12
cartoons
spoofing Mohammed that appeared in a Danish
newspaper
four years ago.
Its decision, which also affects any future pictures
of Mohammed, came after consultations with Muslim
clerics, diplomats and counter-terrorism officials.
(New Criterion
editor Roger Kimball
writes
that it may also have been made out of fear of
Saudi
donors.) As you recall, after the initial
appearance of the cartoons, which are available on
the Internet, violent Muslim protests resulted in
widespread riots and
more than a hundred deaths.

The book, authored by Brandeis University professor and
Danish native
Jytte Klausen,
originally was entitled
The 12 Little
Drawings that Shook the World: The Danish Cartoons and
the Clash of Civilization. Yale University Press
rejected the subtitle as being too sensational. Then it
ruled that the book could not include the cartoons or
even pictures of
Mohammed,
in deference to some Muslim clerics who rule against the
practice.

European governments serially sought to propitiate the
most radical Islamists by not allowing that religion to
be spoofed, as are all others, in their mass media.

Now the infection has spread to America—and to my alma
mater. One of Yale`s early grads was Nathan Hale, who as
you recall, told his British captors in our
Revolutionary War just before he was executed,
"I regret that I have but one life to give for my
country."
Freedom is something Americans have fought and died for
since our birth as a nation.

Remember France`s 2005 riots? As I
remarked
in my Pittsburgh
Tribune piece of November 19, 2005, those massive
immigrant Islamic riots reminded me of the 1973 Jean
Raspail book The Camp of the Saints

"Who were these rioters?"
asks Mr. Caldwell.
"Were they
admirers of France`s majority culture, frustrated at not
being able to join it on equal terms? Or did they simply
aspire to burn to the ground a society they despised,
whether for its exclusivity, its hypocrisy, or its
weakness?"

Should other important media outlets buckle as Yale has
done, the huge present number of legal and illegal
Islamic immigrants here already might well be emboldened
to take radical actions, keying off the European
experience.

Noted American scholars such as the late
Samuel Huntington
of Harvard and
Lawrence E. Harrison,
the Director of the Cultural Change Institute at
Fletcher School at Tufts University, have long warned us
of the potentially dire cultural consequences of
importing, without need or restrictions, radically alien
immigrants into the US.

As Caldwell`s book explains, many of these Islamic
aliens in Europe have shown no interest in the European
way of life, culture, or history and in fact often come
with dangerous animosities based on their extreme
Islamic views.

Caldwell`s comparing Europe`s plight with the Cold
War puts ice down my spine:
"Imagine that the
West, at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass
inflow of immigrants
from Communist countries who were ambivalent about
which
side they supported",
he writes. "Something
similar is taking place now."

There has been nothing, Mr. Caldwell suggests, quite
like the recent influx of Muslims into Europe—he refers
to it as "a
rupture in its history".

"In the middle of the 20th century, there were virtually
no Muslims in Western Europe",
Mr. Caldwell writes.
"At the turn of
the 21st, there were between 15 and 17 million Muslims
in Western Europe, including 5 million in France, 4
million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain."

These immigrants are further swamping Europe
demographically, he adds, because of their high
fertility rates. He points to small facts as well as
large ones. In Brussels in 2006, the seven most common
given boys` names "were
Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine, and Hamza."

One of my Pakistani friends advises me that numerous
new born males in his country are named Osama!

The most chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell`s book may
be that the debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is
one that the continent can`t openly have, because anyone
remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic.
Europe`s citizens—as well as its leaders, its artists
and, crucially, its satirists—are scared to speak
because of a demonstrated willingness by Islam`s
fanatics to commit violence against their perceived
opponents. There exists, Mr. Caldwell writes,
"a kind of
`standing fatwa` against Islam`s critics."

In short, most of these European new arrivals are not
assimilating, but rather dreaming of the world back home
that never existed, enjoying the freedoms of the West
while culturally reviling it.

Now, as our economy suffers the worst downturn in
decades, we have reason to be even more careful of who
comes here. If we fail to learn from the history
now so clearly evolving in Europe we will have only
ourselves to blame.

Maybe Yale`s glitch can serve as a wakeup call to all of
us.

Donald A. Collins [email
him], is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own.